WHAT’S ALREADY DONE ISN’T NECESSARILY DONE YET

Repeatedly and with great consistency, during most of my life I have somehow managed to create my own realities, key aspects of the world I live in. I have done this not just through hard work but also through the power of focused intention. The process has led me to believe that we live in worlds of our own creation based on our beliefs and intentions. I call the process Intentional Reality Creation (IRC). IRC often seem to work through completely mystical means. In the wake of my focused intention, events and Circumstances completely beyond my control somehow seem to conspire to create what I deeply want. It also works to create things against great odds to the contrary. Yet, after the fact there appears to be a complete causal chain for the appearance of the creation, wiping away any element of mystery. What is going on?

The idea IRC is far from new; intention-based reality creation has long been practiced by Buddhist monks and a version of it is central to ancient Jainism. In all of the spiritual traditions embodying the concept of karma, intent plays a central and definitive role. Practice of IRC is probably as old as humankind. Today, practice of forms of IRC is advocated by a diverse collection of new age philosophers like Wayne Dyed, Werner Erhardt, Harry Palmer, Lynne McTaggart and many psychics. IRC is a practice in the Noetic Sciences, and Dan Brown’s book The Lost Symbol has a characters that practices it. What is new here and in my writings is a decent explanation compatible with science of how it works.

IRC has traditionally been seen as a spiritual practice that works through mystical means probably inscrutable to science. I have not been satisfied with leaving it at that. On the one hand I am a scientist at heart and by training and am uncomfortable with mystical or religious explanations. On the other hand, I have practiced IRC almost all of my life and have developed trust that it really works. So, I started to think hard about IRC some 50 years ago and begin making notes about how it might work in a way compatible with what we know about science and how the universe works. The result has been the evolution of a treatise On Being and Creation which is available on my website www.vincegiuliano.com. I have continued to tweak this treatise as new insights have emerged. I suggest that IRC works like a macroscopic form of quantum mechanics, basically according to the same rules and principles found there. The arguments in the treatise are complex. I provide a simplified explanation here leaving out the more-technical science.

Basically, understanding IRC turns our world views of reality and time inside-out and upside down, so much as to seem ridiculous. The same happened in the world of subatomic physics with quantum theory, starting over 100 years ago. Physicists including Einstein were very upset with the explanations given for quantum physics for they made no sense from the viewpoint of our ordinary experience. Particles can be multiple places at once, particles are sometimes waves, hypothesized quantum waves can go backward as well as forward in time. According to one framework of explanations (the Copenhagen interpretation), objects like particles exist in multiple states characterized by a probability distribution until they are actually observed. The probability of an outcome of a measurement is determined by as wave function which specifies a probability distribution. Reality does not materialize until it is observed. The famous Schrodinger’s cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time. Only when the box is opened does the cat settle down being either dead or alive. According to another framework of explanation for quantum effects (the multiple-universe theory), events occur in an infinity of universes and an observation selects a sub-infinity of universes where the observed result is manifested. None of these theories make everyday sense but quantum theory works and is responsible for many of our achievements in science and technology.

In my treatise I have examined IRC from the viewpoint of three different frameworks for looking at quantum physics: the Copenhagen interpretation, the multiple universe framework and John Cramer’s transactional interpretation. These frameworks provide different ways for looking at the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics and they work equally well for looking at the strange phenomena of Intention-based reality creation. The explanation for IRC provided here is a partial and simplified hybrid of frameworks.

In my view IRC does not require meditation, prayer, special rituals or extraordinary concentration or a lot of time. If I want to create X, all it takes is for me declaring to myself “In the universe in which I live, X exists,” but I have to mean it and believe it without mental reservations or fingers crossed. That’s all there is to it. Thus, IRC happens in an instant when a person shifts himself or herself into a set of universes where that intention is destined to be manifest. The new set of universes is infinitely large and is a subset of the infinite set of universes the person was in just before the declaration. The shift happens instantaneously though it may take some for the desired reality creation to become manifest. For example, in 1953 I had dropped out of a Master’s Degree program with the grades of incomplete in six out of the 8 courses I was taken being lapsed. In the army as a private at the time, I formulated an intention to go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton to study for a Ph.D. with a full scholarship. At the moment I was not in a position to even think about applying to any of those schools. But the specified reality became manifest only 3 years later when I was admitted to a Ph.D. program at Harvard with a generous scholarship.

The physics of creating via IRC

According to one quantum physics interpretation applied to IRC (Cramer’s), at time of creation of an IRC, a quantum wave goes out forward in time and a conjugate wave propagates backwards in time, both of which are seeking to line up circumstances to be compatible with the creation. The backwards-traveling wave finds all kinds of things and events in the past that the formulator of the IRC may or may not know about that will eventually contribute to a causal chain that makes the creation inevitable. When a backwards-traveling wave encounters an event or circumstance that can further the creation, a forward-traveling confirmation wave is generated. Similarly, a forward-traveling wave, moving at the speed of light seeks out future events that will further the creation, and sends confirming waves backwards in time. All those waves combine at the instant of creation, saying that the creation is a done deal. The deal is done though may require some time, even years, for full existence of the intended creation to be manifest.

Taking my example of getting into a Ph.D. program, what did the backward-traveling wave find in my past and present? They included:

My reading and being impressed by an article in Popular Science about a professor Howard Aiden who had built a “giant brain” at Harvard. I read this in 1943 when I was a high school Junior.

My excellent undergraduate performance and reputation of being a whiz-kid in mathematics at the University of Michigan

Certain world-class mathematicians, physicists and philosophers who I had studied with who were willing to give me first-class personal endorsements

The fact that I had practical experience with computers starting in 1952 on one of the very first general-purpose machines in operation

The forward-traveling wave found many events yet-to-happen including

A willingness of the University of Michigan administration to re-instate my lapsed incompletes

A willingness of my army superiors to give me more than half time away from my army duties time to finish my college incompletes

Willingness of the army to send me to the University of Delaware to take additional graduate courses

Availability of Professor Howard Aiken at the time I happened to go to find him and his willingness to speak to me. Aiken is the grand old man of computers who built and operated the Harvard Mark I, the first general purpose computer during World War II. Out of the blue, I asked Aiken to take me as a graduate student and give me a generous scholarship, transferring my acceptance at Harvard from the mathematics department to his. I said I saw computers as a world-transforming technology and told Aiken I would pursue a long career in this area making many important contributions. Aiken said simply “yes,” and over many years I did what I said I would do to him.

At the moment in 1953 when I formulated the intention to go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton to study for a Ph.D. with a full scholarship, I had no idea whatsoever how that result could come about. In terms of the reality-creation process, quantum waves went out, backwards in time to at least 1943, and forwards to 1959 when I graduated with the Ph. D. and beyond. The whole creation was a done-deal right when I formulated the intention though I did not know how it would play out. While the process was playing out, I was accepted as a Ph.D. student by all three of these universities, and before switching to computer science after meeting Aiken, the mathematics departments at Yale and Harvard get into a competitive battle raising their scholarship offers to try to get me.

IRC creations can be nested in other creations. In fact, I can clearly remember the piles of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines I hoarded as a kid. I read the article about Aiken and Giant Brains multiple times in 1943 and then-and-there firmly decided and declared “I will be part of that giant brain revolution.” And I was.

I can think of dozens of important personal IRC creations that have together combined to shape my life as it is, including one just a few days ago. I list a few here that illustrate the role of the past as well as the future in the IRC process and that show how profoundly IRC has affected my life

1, Getting to be a university professor without passing go

After receiving my Ph. D. from Harvard in 1959 I took a job with the Arthur D. Little Inc, consulting firm, fulfilling an earlier deliberate intention to become an ace scientist-businessman consultant. My work, again by intention, involved dividing my time between basic research on problems of artificial intelligence and practical business consulting with major corporations of how to incorporate computers into their businesses. It was a very productive period from both viewpoints. I cranked out numerous scientific publications and was often invited to speak at international conferences. And from time to time I found myself sitting in corporate boardrooms. Seeing my success, near the end of 1966 I begin thinking “If I am so smart, why aren’t I at a major university where my other scientific colleagues are.” So I formed the intention to be a University professor. But I didn’t want to have to claw myself up through the academic ranks. It usually took fifteen years of very hard work and faculty politics to go from Instructor to Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, to Full Professor. Most who entered this teach-like-crazy and publish-or-parish ladder never made it to the top and the pay did not get decent until the end of the process. My thought was “screw that.” My intention was to start out as a full professor with excellent pay.

I shared this intention with only a couple of people, one being a blind scientist I knew at Bell Laboratories. I did not put out any resumes or publicize the intention in any way. One day a couple of months later I “happened” to get two telephone calls out of the blue. One was from a new Provost at the State University of New York in Buffalo inviting me to come there to interview for a position as Professor and Dean of an intended new graduate school of library and information science. It just “happened” to be that my profile seemed to match what they were looking for. The other call was from Case University which “happened” to merging with Western Reserve University in Cleveland. They where they were looking for a new Dean for the new combined school of Business and Management Science and again “happened” to think I might be a good man for the job. They also asked me to come out for an interview. I set up back-to-back day visits with both Universities in a few weeks. I choose the Buffalo opportunity as the better one for me. It came with a Deanship and a Full Professorship with tenure. I asked for a higher salary than I was getting from consulting, one that would make me one of the highest-paid people on campus. And they gave it to me. They offered me the position and I took it. There is a lot more to this story including a later intention to leave the university and go back into the world where I could make a bigger difference. Enough to say that my intention fully materialized into reality.

2. Creating a great extended family

In 1971 I had an incredible family and personal intimacy mess on my hands. I was married to my second wife and was raising four children with her. I had divorced my first wife with whom I had had another two children. My second wife was jealous of the time spent with the children sired with my first wife. A lover, a woman who would become my third wife, had for several years been living in the house with me, my second wife and that family that included four children. A fourth woman friend of mine showed up with a baby that I had sired; she was to become my fourth wife and present. Then my third wife decided to have another baby with me and I concurred. I loved all of these women and children. I was telling the truth to everyone but there was a lot of anger and distrust among the three women. And at the time I was regularly sleeping with each of them. Earlier I had lied a lot. How could I sort it out so it would work? How could I fulfill my commitment to be a father fully present while the two new small children were raised?

Fortunately, by then I already knew about IRC and put it to work. I formed an unbounded intention to create a harmonious extended family characterized by love, compassion and generosity – one that works for everybody. Within three or four years that family materialized and has endured since. We have regularly celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and other holidays with all the extended family members who live in our part of the country, all my wives and children past and present and their children and loved ones. There is friendship and love all around, and no remaining conflict. We brought a large house in the suburbs in 1985. My wife and our son and I lived on one floor, my third wife and my son with her lived on the second floor. We shared many dinner and family events as an extended family. Both my boys grew up living with their father and mother and are now close brothers as adults. They are off on their own, living close-by, happily married and each has two wonderful grandchildren. The two mothers and I remain in the family house as a close supportive unit, enjoying frequent and warm contact with our son’s families and our four grandchildren.

People ask me “How did you pull that off Vince?” I didn’t pull anything off. I created an unbounded intention that served the interest of all concerned, and the results of the intention materialized. A lot had to do with what I did to make this possible, but a lot more had to do with what people would call “good fortune” and the generosity of the women concerned. My intentions with respect to family and intimacy have existed as reality since about 1973.

3. Creating ideal work with my wife

In 1993 my job as Chief Scientist of a software company was coming to an end and I was doing a lot of thinking about what I might want to do next. I had a number of discussions about this with my wife Melody and we decided it would be very nice if we could work together as a team and if our work could involve significant travel in Latin America. Why Latin America? Because it fascinated us though our exposure to it had been very minimal. We had spent a couple of days in Puerto Rico and had made a short excursion into Mexico from San Diego. So I formulated an unbounded intention, essentially “Melody and I will do interesting work together in Latin America for which we will be well paid. And this will allow us travel together frequently to new and interesting places there.” I shared this intention with Melody and formulated it with a lot more detail. From the notes I made at the time: “The work should serve to bring balance to my life, and should not pose serious conflicts with my general intentions and goals. Thus, it should involve some travel, but not prolonged periods of work away from home.” “The assignments should provide me with variety, good people to interact with in interesting ways, and intellectual challenge.” “The number of days worked and the conditions of the work should match my internal needs for balance – balance between private creative work, interacting with others, travel and being home, working and being with family members, working for pay and playing and creating with music, etc.” “I should work between 75 and 150 days per year (work being days of consulting or consulting marketing) with average income per day of $1,000.” These quotes are lifted unedited from a 1994-1995 document I wrote recording the original intention. All these details specified in the intention showed up in the reality created by the intention.

I had no idea about how this intention could be realized when I formulated it. Neither of us knew any Spanish or Portuguese. Neither of us had any work contacts in Latin America or had any inkling of what we actually could do there. We did not know the cultures or the countries. It took about a year for the intention to materialize into reality, in a completely unplanned and “lucky” way. I “happened” to write a paper about the successes and failures of newspapers creating online editions (a pioneering topic in 1993) and “happened” to send a copy to Tony Oettinger, my Ph.D. thesis advisor many decades before. Tony “happened” to share my paper with a visiting Spanish Scholar Juan Antonio Giner who “happened” to be the director of Innovation, a Spanish consulting group which “happened” to have major newspaper and magazine company clients throughout Latin America and in Spain. Juan Antonio contacted me and we had lunch in the Harvard Faculty Club and it soon became clear that I “happened” to have a major message for his Latin American Newspaper clients: “Now is the time for you to take your newspaper online.” And I “happened” to have credibility and background to deliver that message (I had “happened” to have been a Vice President of a major US newspaper chain subsidiary, Times Mirror) and I “happened” to have the depth of background in online services and consulting skills to allow me to assist those newspapers to go online. Finally, with the emergence of the Internet being just then, it “happened” to be a good time to excite the Latin American publishers about Internet and pursue consulting studies with them that actually helped them build their online services.

The outcome was full realization of my intention. Melody and I were a small consulting team that traveled and did consulting projects in Latin America and Spain for about a 10 year period. I traveled, worked and lectured in Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Chile, Paraguay, Uraguay, Argentina and Spain and Italy. For several years we made more money than I had been earning in my previous regular jobs. The projects involved frequent travel and Melody accompanied me on many trips I also had an intention going at the time to have a rich home life and raise my two boys. So the projects involved a lot of our work being done from home. My intention materialized reality to every element of detail specified.

You are probably getting the point by now that all of these stories of realized intentions can be explained away (after-the-fact) as having occurred by accident and good fortune. True. That is how IRC works. Waves go backward and forward in time to line up events and circumstances to lead the intended creation to occur as a result of normal “luck” and cause-and-effect. There is nothing mysterious about the chain of events leading up to a creation or the creation itself after it happens. What is amazing is that such chains can be triggered by simple intentionality. After creating a reality by intention, it is completely explainable by chains of cause and effect.

4. Creating a Connection to my grandfather’s Family

Here is another example. In late 2006 I decided I would like to do something with my two youngest sons, Joe 27 and Mike 29 that brought us closer and perhaps connects them with our family history in some way. My grandparents were from Italy, I have an Italian name and I thought in terms of Italy and being Italian. So, I invited Mike and Joe to accompany me to a trip to Italy in the summer of 2007. They accepted and we had discussions about where we might go. Joe thought it might be great visiting the great cities, museums and cathedrals of the North – Venice, Florence, Padua, Milan and the like. At first I agreed, I had visited Italy a few times over the years and the whole family visited there when the boys were in their early teens. But none of this travel took me much further South than Naples.

We agreed to research the possibilities further. However I found myself formulating a clear intention to connect us all more directly with our family roots – to discover whether there are any Giulianos directly related to my grandfather and if so connect with those people while sharing the experience with my sons. My grandfather was born and raised in Calabria, the southernmost province in mainland Italy. So my intention was to discover what the part of my patrimonial family there still is in Calabria and get us into relationship with and visit that family branch. When I made the intention I had no idea of how to proceed. I knew my grandfather was born around 1880 in a town in Calabria called Squillace, but that was about it. I had no documents that could help, so I thought. I had never been personally in contact with any relative in Calabria and had no idea whether any existed or if so where. The name Giuliano is almost as common in Italy as Jones is here. So that by-itself did not provide much of a basis for discovery. My grandfather died fifty years ago and only he knew who to look for where.

Here is what happened after declaring the intention. I half-heartedly started searching for Giuliano relatives in Calabria on Internet in Italian public records and genealogy sites. I came up with tons and tons of Giulianos but none were right. The trail remained stone cold. Then one evening my eye wandered up from my computer screen to the wall behind it. There happened to be hanging my Grandfather’s 1902 Honorable Discharge certificate when he finished his service with the Italian Army. My cousin had given this to me from my grandfather’s remains years ago. The certificate has been hanging on my wall for many many years. Moving my head a bit I can see the document hanging there now as I write this. I got up to look at the document and discovered I needed a magnifying glass to read the hand-scrawled writing. The document says my grandfather was discharged in from the Italian army in 1902. Later my wife suggested that I open up the sealed frame and see if the document had anything more to say. Taking the document out of the frame, we saw that the back of it his residence at the time was listed as in San Pietro a Maida. With the aid of Google World, I discovered San Pietro Maida is a town of 3,500 inhabitants nestled in the hills of central Calabria, in the arch of the foot of Italy. I had never heard of this town before. Internet at the time revealed no way to contact the town government by e-mail so I wrote a snail-mail message in Italian addressed to the mayor. I asked the mayor if he knew of anyone in the town government who could give me any assistance in identifying any relatives of mine who were still there. There was no answer. But early one morning I received a phone call from somebody who spoke only Italian. We could talk because I happened to have learned a fair amount of Italian as a youth and in the course of my travels. The person identified himself as Nicola Giuliano. He happened to be The Vice Mayor of San Pietro a Maida and the Mayor had handed my letter to him. In the course of further discussions and e-mails we also established he happened to be as close a cousin as I could possibly have in Calabria. His grandfather and my grandfather were brothers.

Nicola also happened to be warm and welcoming of a relationship with me and my sons and Joe and Mike and I ended up staying at his house in San Pietro a Maida. Nicola put us in touch with a rich network of other Giuliano cousins who happened to be either in town or visiting. The first evening we arrived Nicola had happened to have arranged a Giuliano family reunion of 96 people in a local restaurant. I happened to be warmly welcomed as the surrogate of my grandfather with the same name who had left the town 105 years earlier. Nicola and I happened to be able to forge a powerful bond together. The trip made and left a powerful emotional impact, and now Joe, Mike and I are in touch with a previously-unknown branch of the family in Calabria. Melody, my wife, and I visited there again in May 2008 and Nicola and Rosa his wife came to Boston for my 80th birthday in November 2008. It’s crazy-wonderful. The intention has fully materialized into reality.

From a common-sense viewpoint what was involved here was a combination of intentionality and luck, call it happenstance. Was it that, or the creation of an intended reality? I think it was both. The intentionality expresses itself through what looks after-the-fact as luck and propitious circumstances. It’s always that way. In quantum physics, we would say that reality creation preserves causality.

5. Creating myself as an eminent longevity scientist

In 1994 I formulated an intention to live in good health until the age of 235, an intention that is still working its way into manifestation. Projecting success of this intention left open the question of what I was going to pursue as a career over the next several decades. It was nice being a computer artist for a few years after my Internet-consulting career but by late 2005 I wanted to devote my energies to a career that was more intellectually challenging and that had greater social impact. In 2006 I formulated a clear intention to enter a new career as a longevity scientist, requiring that I create myself as a highly-informed and internationally-known and respected professional in that area. In my previous careers I had enjoyed a reputation as a significant contributor and was frequently asked to speak at international conferences. I wanted that for starters in my new career too. I also wanted sufficient financial compensation to support my family as an aspect of my new career. From a conventional wisdom viewpoint these outcome were highly unlikely because at the time a) I had no background whatsoever in the life sciences. I had not even taken a high school biology class, b) I did not at that time have enough background to be able to read many key journal articles related to the multiple facets of the aging sciences, c) I had no degrees or accreditation normally required for recognition or functioning in the highly structured academic areas concerned, and d) I was already 76 years old, too old given the conventional wisdom that “an old dog cannot learn new tricks.” An in-depth background in biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, cell processes, genomics, protein dynamics and other arcane areas seemed to be required.

Going back to college and graduate school would have required 6-8 years for me to take the necessary courses and get the necessary degrees. And that would have still left me as a nobody in longevity science. Further, I would have been left out of participating in the field during critical early years of its development. Yet another time, my reaction was “screw that.” I choose a different route, forming a clear intention in 2008 to become a longevity scientist, an important contributor for understanding what evolving science says about lifespans, and a contributor to development of interventions that can help us lead longer, healthier lives.

As of now nine years later, this creation is rapidly unfolding in a most gratifying way. I can read and actually understand important scientific publications related to the multiple facets of aging. I generate a highly popular agingsciences.com blog now containing over four hundred technical treatises I have written on aspects of longevity science and an overall treatise on longevity science. These websites attract over 3,000 unique readers a day and I have an estimated international following of over 100,000. Among over 60,000 registered subscribers are scientists, science students and intellectuals who want to do have access to my historical articles. I have developed proposed interesting and unique theories related to life extension, developed close collegial professional relationships, have offered a number of invitational presentations at professional conclaves including keynote presentations, have received a “scientist of the year” award, have created You Tube longevity science presentations, and have appeared in the movie To Age or Not to Age. Though the financial compensation component of this intention is not fully manifest yet, the overall creation is well on its way to being there. This particular creation has involved both application of the creative process of intentionality and hard work on my part. But being a competent hard-working longevity scientist is part of what I set out to create.

A number of other compelling personal reality-creating stories come to mind but these are sufficient to make my points. There are lots of examples of smaller creations too.

Characteristics of IRC

Some of the characteristics of all the successful reality-creating initiatives I have taken are:

Looking forward from when I made the intention, I had no inkling of how the intention could be realized. There was no action plan, approach, no notion of how or where to get into action, only pure intentionality. The universe subsequently provided the clues that guided me into action.

Most strategic planning experts think that it is ridiculous to formulate an intention without some action plan to make it real. They say things like “Setting a goal without an action plan is meaningless.” The opposite is true for me. The best approach has been to declare the “what” of the intention leaving the “how to” wide open. And then let the universe guide me through whatever tortuous paths that are required to getting my intended results.

There is a good reason for this. In the sense of quantum physics, the what of creation and the how of that creation are what are called complementary variables. This means they satisfy a form of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and completely specifying one makes the other one unknowable. Specifying the what and leaving the how completely open makes the creation job a lot easier for the universe. This is because there are generally vastly more ways to arrive at a result than ways I know about, can favor, or even imagine.

I think most failures of intentional reality creation are due to over-specificity of both what and how, violating this complementarity principle. That is, intentions of the form: “I intend A so it will lead to B so I can have C leading to D.” As an example, consider a 12 year old Roxbury MA inner-city boy who intends “I will become an ace basketball player so I will be invited to get on the Celtics team, so I will make a lot of money and be famous and then get what I want in life.” Such an intention probably has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of success. If the intention was simply “I intend to get what I want in life,” there would be a vast number of paths available for this to happen.

After declaring the intention all kinds of things started to happen: relevant unknown past events were discovered, “accidental” or unforeseen things “happen,” and other processes occur in the path of materializing my intention into reality. Events and circumstances and happenstances over which I have no control combine in unpredictable ways to help me get what I want and make the creation real. That is, the universe takes over the how to part for me. Of course, once the universe reveals a path to realizing an intention, I can and do pitch in with supportive actions. For example, I had to apply to the graduate schools to get into them.

Looking backwards from when an intention is already realized, it can always be seen that there was a cause-and-effect chain of circumstances happenings and situations that made the intention possible. Most people would leave it by saying: “He wanted something and by intelligence, hard work and luck he managed to get it.” Right. What seems to require a miracle before it happens is easily explained after it happens. Why does it appear this way? Because a new creation is made in the presence of profound set of prior creations, namely the laws of ordinary reality which include cause-and-effect. If my historically-impossible creation of living healthily to age 235 is realized, I suspect most credit for that will be given to advances in science, not to my “crazy” 1994 reality-creation intention. That is unless reality creation is much more acknowledged then in the future than it is now, another of my intended IRC creations

The past is undetermined

A person knows only a very tiny fraction of the past history that could affect him or her in the future. What IRC does is select from a very large number of possible events and circumstances from the past and bring them forward into the present and future so as to contribute to a creation by cause-and-effect. Take the intention of my discovering my relatives on Calibria as a simple example. Without the intention, would I have ever opened up the ancient sealed frame on my study wall to read on the back of the document the name of my town my grandfather lived in before he left Italy in 1902? Probably not. Would I have even put the ancient document on my wall in the first place? Quite possibly not. Would I have buried that frame with hundreds of others in boxes and piles in my immense back attic? Probably. Moving to the less-known. My cousin Nicola was Vice Mayor and known by the mayor long before I formulated my intention to locate relatives. Is it ridiculous to think that my intention selected me into a subset of universes where Nicola was born, was Vice Mayor of San Pietro a Maida at the time and receptive to discovering a new cousin in the US? Not according to the parallel universes explanation of IRC.

Another example was meeting Howard Aiken and getting into his program at Harvard. At the time I was living in Detroit and visiting the Boston area for only a day. Aiken was a very busy man who was usually traveling or engaged in meetings and appointments. He just “happened” to be there when I called, “happened” to agree to talk with me, some unknown graduate student candidate, and “happened” to agree to meet that day with me with only a half-hour later. Was all of this simply due to luck?

As another example, take the intention that led to an Internet consulting career in Latin America. You will recall that a person, Juan Antonio, showed up who had close ties with media companies throughout Latin America. That was his part of his past. And my intention was to work in Latin America. Suppose my intention had been to work instead in Japan. Would a Japanese gentleman with close ties to media organizations in Japan showed up instead? And, the same question for China, Russia, Scandenavia, etc? Tony Oettinger had people from all over the world associated with his international communications program. Why did he give my paper to a Spaniard with Latin American ties instead of to someone else? He knew nothing about my intent that I would work with my wife in Latin America. Again, now after the fact you can attribute all of this as being due to luck. I think much more is involved and I call it intentional reality creation.

What is actually so?

“The world is flat. Go too far and you will fall off of it.”

“The idea that there are invisible and undetectable waves passing all around us that can carry pictures and sounds is completely absurd and has no scientific basis.”

“What is done is done. The past is done, immutable, you can’t change it.”

I am suggesting that these three statements agree with common sense but are equally false. They do express what had been unquestioned truths grounded in tens of thousands of years of direct human experience. Pythagoras challenged the idea that the world was flat in the 6th century. But everybody could see that the world is essentially flat and that belief persisted for over a thousand years more. I now challenge the fully accepted idea that the past is fixed and immutable. Radio and television started out as “wireless telegraphy” in 1895. Before that, the idea of invisible waves carrying messages at best would get you declared a nut; at worst it could get you burned at the stake. And I expect this new view of past being different in accessible alternative universes might also take a long time to soak in. I believe we can affect what has already happened within broad limits to get what we want now. This is easier for me to stomach than might seem, since it has been one of the major approaches for explaining quantum physics for over 80 years now.

Making Scientific Sense of Intentional Reality Creation

Going back 40-50 years, as a younger man with a strong scientific background and training, my repeated personal successes at intentional reality creation were a major source of dissonance for me. It was driving me a little nuts. On the one hand, IRC seemed to be working superbly to help me get what I wanted out of life. On the other hand doing this seemed to be like making fairy tale wishes or Voodoo magick spells -in both cases completely anti-scientific and irrational. I could just intend and wish for something, and that’s all it would take to make it happen? Got to be kidding. I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny or spiritualism and am not some savage medicine man 10,000 years ago. I have a science Ph.D. from Harvard, write papers in science journals and have a professional reputation to protect. I never have had much patience for Gurus, mediums, new-age mystics or parapsychologists.

Fortunately, a number of years earlier when I was studying for my Ph.D. at Harvard I had already come across an immense sea of irrationality that had similarly challenged my mind. That sea of irrationality was in the very worst place. Known as Quantum Mechanics it was smack in the middle of hard physical science. Quantum physics was of interest to me since high school, and I selected it as a central area for my advanced graduate level studies. I studied with giants of the field like Julian Schwinger and Wendell Furry at Harvard and studied relativity theory with Yuri Rainich at the University of Michigan. Coming to terms with these extremely strange bodies of science was very difficult and the process rewired my brain in some crazy way. I remember one morning when I woke up as a graduate student and realized that this had happened. I had confronted the fact that reality on the deepest level is not at all what it seems to be. My faith in singular objective reality had been completely crushed. And it remains crushed still.

A central insight about IRC happened later, about 50 years ago when I was in my 30s. I put together that the models of reality long-used to explain quantum mechanics could also be used to explain IRC. I did not have to rewire my brain a second time to see how IRC can be compatible with what is known in science! I started making paper notes about IRC for my own use then and continued this practice accumulating these notes through the years.

Desiring to share these insights and drawing on these notes, I wrote the first complete draft of my treatise On Being and Creation in August 1990. And I have re-written and expanded that treatise numerous times since, publishing versions of it on my Writings Site since about 1994. The latest version was published in January 2017.

There is much more to say about intentional reality creating than what I can include in this shorter more-personal note. If you are interested I suggest you go to the treatise, a click away if you are online. Here is the Chapter guide for it:

PREAMBLE – Winners and losers in life and the difference between causation and intention-based creation.

I. OUR UNIVERSE, SCIENCE, AND CREATION– A general discussion relating to both science and philosophy that provides background for the principles of reality creation and introduces key distinctions including our universe, everything-nothing, source and creation. What is believed to be known about the creation of our universe. Why personal reality creation is no stranger than quantum physics, and that the same models of reality can be used to explain both.

II. OUR UNIVERSE, SCIENCE, AND CREATION – Delves deeper into the relationships between the philosophical underpinnings of personal reality creation and science. The extremely strange nature of reality at the fundamental level as fully acknowledged by science but unknown to most. The limits of our understanding of reality based on our perceptual capabilities which are evolved from those of our primate ancestors. Basic paradoxes and unanswered questions in science. Emergence in basic physics and cosmology of multiple universe interpretations.

III. A MODEL FOR PERSONAL CREATION OF REALITY – More key distinctions including consciousness, beings and experience records. Ordinary and extraordinary ways for determining the future. Causation vs. intention-based creation.

IV. CREATION AND UNIVERSES – About reality. Under-determination of the past, the act of creation, multiple universes and creation, introduction to macroscopic reality creation (MRC) and quantum physics. (Note: MRC in that document is the same as IRC in this document)

VI. SOME PERSONAL REALITY CREATION ADVENTURES – Some stories of personal MRC from my life. Characteristics of the creation process.

VII. THE HOW-TO OF CREATION – The very simple process of creation.

VIII. PURPOSE OF LIFE AND MORALITY – Relating to my personal ethics, morality and spirituality. Winners and losers in life, about good and evil, entropy as related to good and evil, purpose of the universe, my mission in life, playing to win in life.

X. PENROSE-HAMEROFF PHYSICAL BASIS FOR REALITY CREATION – A possible explanation for how conscious acts of creation can generate powerful quantum waves in terms of quantum biology, quantum computers in the brain with “coherence states” which create consciousness, central points of this theory.

Quantum physics has enabled countless technological advances that we benefit from every day – our cell phones, TVs, worldwide communications, MRI machines, solar and nuclear energy, lasers, tasers and masers, space satellites and explorations – the list goes on and on. Yet quantum physics makes no sense. So, the conventional wisdom for over 80 years has been to tell wondering intellectuals “Just shut up and use the formulas.” The results of doing so have been of remarkable accuracy, consistency and usefulness.

Perhaps personal reality creation should be viewed the same way “OK, it makes no sense to you. Just shut up and use the simple intentional reality creation procedure to get what you want in life.” The point of my treatise is that the procedure working can be perfectly compatible with science, although inherently “unprovable” using the scientific method. Numbers can’t be proved by the scientific method either by the way, though science would be nowhere without them.